1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to polymer compositions comprising fluorinated polymers useful as soil repellent finishes for substrates such as leather, textiles, paper, wood, masonry, metals, plastics, glass, painted surfaces, and the like.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Polymeric compositions of perfluorinated organic compounds have been used in the past to provide soil repellent finishes for a variety of substrates. Polymeric compositions of perfluorinated organic compounds have found wide use as oil and water repellent finishes especially for textile materials.
Such compositions have been applied to textiles and other substrates from aqueous and solvent solution systems. In many instances, the solvents required for satisfactory results were expensive fluorinated solvents such as trifluorotoluene, and 1,1,2-trifluoro-1,2,2,-trichloroethane.
While many known polymeric compositions of the prior art have been used to provide finishes exhibiting at least satisfactory oil and water repellent properties, the durability of finishes utilizing prior art perfluorinated polymer compositions has often been much less than satisfactory. Thus, while the fabric or other substrate, which has been treated with a prior art perfluorinated polymer composition, might initially have satisfactory or even excellent oil and water repellent properties, after a short period of utilization and/or subsequent to being treated by a cleaning process, the repellent finish has largely lost its effectiveness due to poor adherence to the substrate.
One approach to increasing the durability of previously known perfluorinated polymer compositions in textile finishes is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,068,187 wherein a segmented copolymer selected from block and graft copolymers comprising an A segment having four polymerized units containing a perfluorinated group and containing at least 30% by weight of fluorine, and a B group comprising five consecutive monomeric units of a polymerizable monomer different from the fluorine containing monomeric units and in which the B segments contains less than 10% of fluorine derived from the perfluorinated compound of the A group is employed.
The compositions utilized in U.S. Pat. No. 3,068,187 utilize perfluorinated monomer compounds which readily homopolymerize including a relatively large variety of compounds containing perfluorinated alkyl groups based upon acrylic or methacrylic acid.